Wine Tasting Experiences
ThirtyFifty is an award-winning wine tasting company offering wine tasting events and wine appreciation courses in the UK. Our wine tastings are led by ThirtyFifty's team of wine experts, all are qualified to WSET Level 3 or WSET Diploma Level 4 and are experienced wine presenters.
Wine Tasting Evenings, Days and Weekends
We have a range of evening, day and weekend wine tasting experiences available across the UK. Our Wine Tasting Evenings are available in London, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham and our One Day Wine Courses are held in London and Buckinghamshire. The One Day Wine Course can also be booked as part of a Wine Tasting Weekend.
Prices are £49 per person for the Introduction to Wine Tasting and Chris Scott's UK Wine Tour Tastings, and in London our Champagne & Fizz evening tastings. All evenings include bar snacks or canapés. Our One Day Wine Course, Discovery Day Course and Champagne & Sparkling Tasting Day, all with a delicious 3 course lunch, are £99 per person. The weekend wine tasting breaks are priced from £199 per person including one night's accommodation with dinner and breakfast and the One Day Wine Course.
You'll meet like-minded wine drinkers and learn in a small group of around 14 people so can attend either by yourself or why not invite a friend or two along? If you have a group of over 12 people we can of course come to you, read more »
When most of us are offered a glass of wine, we might base our choice on its geographical region, the colour, or even the smell, but few of us go to the lengths of swirling the wine gently to release the appropriate aromatic molecules. It might sound silly, but this really is the best way to release the real scent. Smell and taste are so closely related that if you find a wine you love the smell of; chances are you should love the taste too.
Our fully qualified team of wine connoisseurs at ThirtyFifty are experts on how to find and select the best wines. Our wine tasting course advisers can guide you through the properties of any bottle, explaining everything from the optimum temperature to store your wine at, to which type of glass it would be best served in. All our staff are WSET qualified with years of wine tasting experience, and bring all the information and enthusiasm you could want from the host of a wine tasting course.
You can also request our co-founder Chris Scott for your wine tasting experience if you wish. With endless knowledge to help you take advantage of our great range of wines on offer, fused with a great sense of humour, it is no wonder we get such good feedback on our wine tasting courses.
Alternatively, if you can gather together a group of twelve or more wine fanatics, we can even bring one of our renowned wine tasting courses direct to your home, where we can include blind tastings and interactive challenges to your wine tasting experience.
Wine Tasting Experience
We love to share our knowledge and our love of wine, so our wine tasting courses can be found in different locations across the UK. Visit us for an evening with friends, or maybe treat your partner to one of our one day courses, where you can try an impressive 16 wines from around the globe, with a three course lunch, for £89 in London and UK locations.
Many who visit our wine tasting courses love the experience so much they then go on to book one of our popular wine tasting weekends, mingling with other wine enthusiasts at popular hotels across the country, where meals and accommodation is also included for a reasonable £159 per person. As well as a relaxing break, these recommended visits equip you with useful hints and tips to take away with you.
For example, many wine amateurs are not aware of the best way to get clues of a wine’s grape variety through observing the colour, but this can really help you seek out a wine that’s perfect for you. A really interesting lesser known tip that benefits your wine tasting experience is that to get the most accurate judgement of a wine’s colour you should always judge it against a white background.
Wine Tasting Days and Evenings
A wine tasting can make the perfect present for a friend or relative. A thoughtful alternative to traditional gifts, we supply gift vouchers that allow you to book a surprise wine tasting course for those closest to you, or if you’re not too familiar with their diary, play it safe and leave your voucher open.
Wine Tasting Gift Vouchers
ThirtyFifty Gift Vouchers make a great Christmas or birthday present for the wine lover in your life. They can be purchased for specific dates or open-dated, valid for 24 months from the date of purchase. We automatically email the voucher to you upon purchase.
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WINE TASTING GIFT VOUCHER - £49 | |
| ThirtyFifty Wine Tasting Evening - Open Dated. Valid for 24 months for ANY of our Evenings including Virtual Tastings | ||
| COST £49 | Buy | |
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WINE TASTING GIFT VOUCHER - £49 | |
| ThirtyFifty Champagne & Sparkling Wine Tasting Evening in LONDON - Open Dated. Valid for 24 months | ||
| COST £49 | Buy | |
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WINE TASTING GIFT VOUCHER - £99 | |
| ThirtyFifty One Day Wine Course & Discovery Day in LONDON - Open Dated. Valid for 24 months | ||
| COST £99 | Buy | |
|
WINE TASTING GIFT VOUCHER - £99 | |
| ThirtyFifty Champagne & Sparkling Wine Tasting & Lunch in LONDON - Open Dated. Valid for 24 months | ||
| COST £99 | Buy | |
Review for Jancis Robinson by Tamlyn Currin
Club 30-50
Tamlyn Currin started doing wine classes with Michael Schmidt about five years ago, and then went down the more conventional route by doing the WSET Intermediate and Advanced in 2006. She plans to be writing her final WSET Diploma exams in June 2009. She recently tried out a less formal approach.
If enthusiasm and vitality are infectious, Chris Scott (pictured) should be quarantined. I was not entirely sure whether to expect much from an Introduction to Wine and Wine Tasting class in London last month. I left invigorated, and it wasn’t simply owing to the fact that Chris does not feel that spitting is necessary in his particular sessions.
The session is packed with humour, but Chris imparts real gems of information under a magnificently covert guise of irreverence. He has strong, and occasionally controversial, opinions (on terroir, for example) but all is made infinitely palatable when balanced with his incisive, wide-reaching knowledge and lack of pretension. He is also deceptively disciplined about managing time, and answering questions without getting too distracted from the task in hand.
ThirtyFifty was started in 2002 by Chris and his wife Jane.The name has nothing to do with age but refers to the conventional wine-growing latitudes on either side of the equator – a theme which cropped up several times during the tasting as it became clear that climate is one of Mr Scott’s key preoccupations. They operate from an internet base and hold private tastings, run an online wine shop and do a series of podcasts.
A session such as the one I attended is limited to 15 people, which works.The format is simple: two tasting glasses, a sheet listing the wines (seven in total), an unused spittoon and a nifty crib sheet of key characteristics for major grape varieties and other useful bits of information. For this session (the first of three), there were four whites and three reds, with one of each served blind. We tasted wine from England, France, Italy, South Africa, Chile and Australia. Chris gets people to score wine on a 5-point scale, based purely on personal enjoyment: 1 = not to my taste, 4 = a pleasure to drink, 5 = outstanding. This gives him an idea of what sort of wine people like, and the universally panned wines do not get picked for tastings again.
If this class was anything to go by, ThirtyFifty has a good formula – it’s a fun, unpretentious social event that is actually very rich in useful, interesting information. Chris covers a broad range of topics but keeps the focus on key aspects such as the structure of the wine, regional influences and climate. He encourages discussion and questions, and selects some good wines. I’d go again.
